Super Eco

Photo credit: Courage India

Die-hard, weekend and thinking-about-trying-it smokers, one and all: would you still smoke (and risk throat, lung cancer and death) if you had to light your butt from a life-sized blackened lung lighter?

No? Well, thousands of smokers in India would and actually do every day thanks to a grizzly new crop of anti-smoking campaign sponsored “Light Up Your Lungs” lighters. The burning coil, progressively blackening in-your-face reminders of the serious health risks smokers inhale are rearing their charred air sacs at cigarette stands throughout the country.

Think 3-D Surgeon General's warning meets cadaver lab meets 9th-grade biology dissection gross-out. Now picture leaning directly into all of that to spark up a killer drag. It’s enough to make people gag, except for in India apparently, where smoking cuts the average man’s life short by 10 years, and an estimated one million people die from smoking related diseases each year.

I suspect this latest anti-smoking shock prop would only be a mildly effective deterrent in the media-gore-numbed U.S. Lung lighters seem too forced, even a bit trite. Their stark, morbid imagery alone can't snuff out a multi-billion-dollar industry nor mass-scale clinical nicotine addiction, but they're a start, a freaky one.

So the question lingers (like second hand smoke and its carcinogenic particulate matter): If you puff, would sparking up with a blackened lung lighter guilt you into smoking your tobacco addiction once and for all? Probably not? How about a hacking, wailing-in-pain lung ashtray? No? Or the UK's ghoulishly named DEATH brand ciggies?

If not, remember, smoking butts is one bad habit that literally dies hard, right down to your fingertips, taste buds, sense of smell and, ultimately, your breath (in more ways than one). Just ask the 5.4 million families worldwide whose loved ones die at the hands of Joe Camel and his poisonous pals each year.